The world is changing. 

Digital marketing is changing. 

It’s no longer simply a case of knowing your stuff, as what works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow. A bit OTT? Perhaps not. We know technology has been changing dramatically, particularly over the last five years, but how about the next five years? Technology is predicted to progress so exponentially that it won’t even be recognisable by today’s standards.

We’re talking, of course, about artificial intelligence, or AI. 
Have you used chatGPT or a similar AI tool? Super fast and super handy, right? But what does Google think? Does it tick the ever-changing SEO boxes? Will AI produced content drive traffic to your website? Is AI even ready yet?

Google’s Thoughts on AI, Please

Google states that AI ‘is not against our guidelines’ but ‘using automation- including AI – to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies’.

Google currently uses what’s known as EEAT, experience, expertise, authority and trust, to check content. Will AI tick most of Google’s checkpoints? As it is today, erm, nope. I mean, AI is great for churning out content and fast. But is it high quality? Thought provoking? Unique? We don’t think so. 

It’s the old quantity over quality debate and Google is looking for high quality content to rank at the top. As SEO guru, Neil Patel, says, ‘Google knows how to cut through the excess and get to the high-quality content users want.’

Is AI Ready to Take Over Human Intelligence Content?

We’ve had some fun playing around with AI and seeing what it can truly do. Some of the graphic design and written copy is truly hilarious. But let’s take it seriously for a minute. 

From what we’ve seen, AI takes existing content and regurgitates it into something new. The facts may be out of date or the biassed direction based on another author’s opinions. Where there is repetition or the content comes across as a bit stale, that’s where human creatives are required to edit and fact check. You could say it is similar to a very rough first draft.

Or you could say, you only get out of AI tools, like chatGPT, what you put in. Learning how to input the correct prompts into chatGPT with thorough and complete information can make a massive difference. If the content that comes out the other end is good, Google won’t care where it’s come from, human or robot. We’re not saying use AI to generate your final content, but utilise it as a sounding board for ideas and structure.

There’s even the debate of why would Google invest so much in their chatGPT competitor, Bard, if they don’t intend on ranking AI produced content higher?

In many industries, AI is taking over already. Unless you’re a surgeon or a teacher, chances are your job could be at risk within the next decade. So, how do we get around this?

Is There a Middle Ground?

At Electric Sheep, we welcome AI with open arms, but only as a part time assistant. For one, we’re not a heartless, money driven corporation and love our human team but, and this is the main point to take away, nothing can replace human life experience, imagination, unique perspectives and new opinions. When we help a business grow, we take on the brand’s voice and personality, we create thought provoking content and we make it entirely unique to the brand. At this stage in AI’s development, it’s not ready to come up with complex creative solutions. 

Maybe we’ve got to change to make AI work for us. Is it time to accept this technology and start mastering it? If we upskill in the best practices in which to use AI and improve our prompting skills, we can stay ahead of the game and use AI to our advantage. After all, AI is going to be hanging around for a while, so, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!